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Washing away our water?
posted 2010 Jan 28Washing away our water?
While the rest of the country seems to be getting hammered with rain and wet weather, the northwest has enjoyed somewhat of a dry spell. Sure enough, the lack of rain here has brought greywater to the front of my mind.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article on how Americans are prone to use too much detergent in their washing machines. The subtitle reads, ‘Too Much Detergent Makes Our Clothes Dingy and Our Machines Smell. Can New Products Break Our Sudsy Habit?’ While the subtitle was interesting, it wasn’t what got me reading. Just under the first few paragraphs in the article was a box with drop text. In bold red letters was the number 600, and the text underneath stated, “Number of wash loads, per year, done by the average household.” (source: Proctor & Gamble)
Take a minute to do that calculation. It comes out to just over 1.5 loads of laundry every day. The article went on to provide more insight into our near obsession with laundry. A 2007 survey of 2,500 people by Whirlpool stated that 78% of those surveyed do approximately nine loads of laundry a week. According to Proctor & Gamble, 1,100 loads of laundry are started every second of every day. Continuing to read I found that not only are we doing large amounts of washes, but the article also states that several new machines add extra rinse cycles to make-up for the overdosing of detergent. We don’t have the resources, but we’re going to use more water as our solution?
I can’t help but think that this is why it is ever so important to advance greywater as the answer to the suburban water shortage. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t fall into the numbers above somewhere – we all do. In fact, I probably wouldn’t enjoy or appreciate sitting next to someone on the bus who is foregoing laundry to save water! But if we are going to have water available for future generations we need to start finding ways to cut back, and use it as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Many understand the need for efficiency, but don’t want to change their day-to-day routine. Flotender grey2o technology makes this possible by recycling water from not only your washing machine, but also your shower and bath to water your landscape. On average, landscape irrigation makes up 32% of residential water usage. Let’s take the numbers from the studies above and put them to good use. Let’s eliminate 32% of our water usage by making the most of the water we are already using. It doesn’t take much – it just takes people knowing.
Spread the word.